Just more than a half-century ago, city planner Harry Schwartz and his wife, editor Lynne Sharon
Schwartz of the magazine
The Writer, were talking about American fiction in their Boston apartment with
friends.

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger had just come out.

Philip Roth and John Updike had published their first books as James Baldwin, Norman Mailer and
William Styron were hitting their stride.

Yet what did the writers sound like? No one knew.

Public readings weren’t as common in 1961.

And the two main spoken-word record companies, Caedmon and Spoken Arts, concentrated on heavy
hitters such as W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas.

The Schwartzes saw an opportunity to invite a few favorite authors to record excerpts from their
works, then sell the performances in book and record stores.

So began the brief life of Calliope Records.

Released in 1963 for $1.95 each, the series of 7-inch 331/3-rpm discs offered 15-minute readings
by Baldwin, Styron and Updike as well as James Jones, Bernard Malamud and Peter Ustinov.

The series is being reissued, under the title
Calliope Author Readings, on two CDs and downloadable audio files.

The recordings resemble errant postcards delivered decades after the fact.

Updike, tiptoeing his way through the intricate syntax of
Lifeguard from his short-story collection
Pigeon Feathers, sounds youthful and fey. It takes an effort to recall that he died in
2009.

With the exception of Roth — who gives a spirited, richly comic rendition of a scene from
Letting Go — the other readers are also dead, lending a time-travel aspect to the
enterprise. Malamud, reading
The Mourners from his story collection
The Magic Barrel, uncorks a Brooklyn accent that left the borough about the same time that
the Dodgers headed for Los Angeles.

Baldwin lends a refined theatricality to passages from
Giovanni’s Room and
Another Country — a contrast to the more muted style of Jones, reading from
From Here to Eternity, and Styron, reading from
Lie Down in Darkness.

Nelson Algren was taped after the original series was released. After rediscovering the reels
last year in their apartment, the Schwartzes edited his performance and included it in the
reissue.

Algren finds a jazzy groove reading excerpts from
The Man With the Golden Arm, with a hypnotic recitation of
Epitaph, the poem that ends that novel.

The Calliope venture was a shot in the dark. With Howard Kahn, a colleague of Harry Schwartz’s
at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the Schwartzes rounded up the writers and organized the
recording sessions with a local sound engineer, Stephen Fassett.

When 15,000 album sleeves were delivered from the printer, the Schwartzes and Kahn, who died in
the mid- 1970s, held pasting parties to fold and glue them.

The writers tackled an unfamiliar medium in a variety of styles.

“Baldwin was a natural,” Lynne Schwartz said in the couple’s apartment in New York. “Malamud did
not seem to have such a good time, but he did fine. Updike was self-effacing and
unpretentious."

Roth — who read narrative passages from
Letting Go in a gentle, reedy voice — kicked into high gear rendering the
Yiddish-inflected dialogue of Levy and Korngold, two old men in a run-down rooming house.

“He was 30 — still young,” Harry Schwartz said. “Now, at readings, he’s less forthcoming, but
then he was a performer, the life of the party.”

Although most of the records sold, Calliope wound up a few thousand dollars in the red. Kahn’s
parents paid off the debt.

Despite pledges made on the original record sleeves, Calliope never recorded Howard Fast, Lotte
Lenya, Archibald MacLeish or C. Northcote Parkinson.

The lack of a woman on the list, Lynne Schwartz said, “has been a thorn in my side.”

On the other hand, she said, “This time we didn’t have to glue anything.”